Today's post is about Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education by Nathan D. Grawe, which is 150 pages about a model the author created to estimate the probability of attending college by race, region and ethnicity. The book is very dry and it reminded me of a HBR cover a few years ago, which exhorted readers not to let numbers undermine their strategy. I think by this point, everyone who works in higher education knows the demographic trends are very worrisome, and I appreciated that the author quantified it and attempted to provide a fine-grained description of how the national trends will play out across the country and various groups. But I think overall all the discussion of the numbers (an increase of 3% here! a decrease of 10% there!) masks the big picture.
Here are a couple of thoughts that crossed my mind while I was reading. First, there is all this talk about how undergraduate student enrollment is projected to drop by the end of the decade, and the author does have one line buried in the book on how the end of the 2020s is definitely not going to be a good time to look for a tenure-track position, but there is no talk about what it is going to mean for the number of graduate students admitted in PhD programs, especially programs that tend to support their students through teaching assistantships and that predominantly graduate students to go into the professorate (in other words, the humanities). The size of a doctoral program matters to its ranking, for instance in the Carnegie classification, and so I don't expect graduate programs to decrease their size willingly, but if an administration provides fewer teaching assistantships to reflect decreases in enrollment, that's probably something students should know before they accept. So programs that guarantee funding for a number of years will be at an advantage because of the increased precarity in the others.
But it seems that there will be, at many institutions, an increase in contingent faculty ("not tenured track") and I am not sure if the students who are now about to pursue doctoral studies understand it will apply to them. The doctoral programs with a track record of placing their students in academia will be at an advantage, but I think most of the faculty at top institutions come from a narrow set of schools. So the upcoming demographic changes at the undergraduate level will affect graduate education in some profound ways, at least in some disciplines. Also, if we think about this a little bit longer, universities that face the most financial pressure may well discontinue certain programs (that is one way to get rid of tenured professors too) and I wonder how the rise of Zoom will play out in that respect. For instance you could imagine that local (ailing) universities will ally to each focus on their strengths and allow their students to enroll in the partner universities' courses via Zoom to take courses that are no longer offered at their institution.
The other comment I wanted to make on this is that the rise of the importance of the high-tuition/high-aid model and in particular the importance of the full-pay student is something I find very worrisome. In academia some of us like to say the student is the product of higher education, and the consumer is society. In teaching we try to do what is best for society by giving the product the right features (right courses etc). But if students start viewing themselves as the consumer of higher education, it changes the dynamics and the time horizon, which gets shifted to the short term. If a student is full-pay, he probably has other avenues to get outstanding work/educational experiences, such as internships through his parents' companies or social networks, since said parents are clearly very successful. Then he may not attend college with the same goals as a student receiving need-based or merit-based aid. He may also get the impression his tuition buys him a passing grade by default.
The interesting part about full-pay students is that universities want to attract them without giving them money (which would go against the definition of having full-pay students) and so they need to attract them based on amenities and experiences, which are expensive to build and maintain, as well as social/alumni networks. I can't end this discussion about full-pay students without being reminded of a comment a colleague of mine made at Lehigh, and I paraphrase: we tend to think that American full-pay students come from families with a lot of money, but certain full-pay foreign students have even more money. Back at Lehigh I used to have quite a few very good Turkish undergraduate students who had been sent to the States because they hadn't done great at the entrance exam to the Turkish universities and their parents were aware of the Lehigh ISE name (often because a parent had gotten a degree from Lehigh). And of course there was the appeal of getting their children away from the country.
Finally, the author comments on the different outlook for two-year and four-year colleges. I thought when I read this that this called for a different strategic model for two-year colleges. For instance, just like regional and national universities hope to attract full-pay students, there could be a greater emphasis for two-year colleges to attract retirees eager for continuing education that would stimulate their mind, like art history or foreign languages. Overall the book completely ignores not-for-credit education (continuing education especially online). It may represent only a small fraction of revenues today, but it could help alleviate the financial pressures down the road. If two-year colleges focus on retirees and provide an enjoyable experience for them toward the end of their life, they may increase the number of them who will include two-year colleges in their will.
One last thought (and then I will really be done, I promise) was about the fact that elite universities are likely to respond to rising demand by increasing selectivity. The author writes (p.120) "[elite schools] may opt to pass on some highly attractive Asian American students for the sake of a more representative student body" and (p.121) "Asian Americans passed up by elite schools would almost surely be snatched up by national schools facing decreasing total enrollments." (It may also mean that national schools would see more students transfer out as the top students, aware that they deserved to have been admitted to a better school, may apply to transfer more aggressively after a year or two.) So attracting top Asian Americans may become a strategy for national schools eager to move up in the rankings.
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